Monday, January 22, 2007

It’s true. About 2 decades ago, back when I was in college (damn, I’m getting old!), I learned to train myself to not have nightmares anymore.

As a kid, I was plagued with horrible nightmares. Some nights, I could remember waking my poor parents up as much as 10 times in a night, as every time my little head hit the pillow, I would soon after awake screaming from one night horror or another.

As I got older, the frequency of my nightmares diminished slightly, but not as much as my parents had hoped, although the type of nightmare I would have got more sophisticated. Gone were the beasties and goblins under my bed, only to be replaced by escaped mental patients with baseball bats and kidnappers.

Then one day, I just made it stop.

I can remember it quite vividly. I was a freshman in college, and I was dreaming that I was in a hot-air balloon race across the Atlantic (yeah, I know…… I’m f’ing weird), when my balloon developed a leak, and I started to sink into the sea, where hungry crocodiles were waiting to chomp me to bits.

This would NORMALLY be about the time I would wake up with a start or a scream, but I had been reading some books on dream therapy and something must have carried over into the world of dreamy-land, because suddenly, inside the dream, I told myself, “This is a dream, and I can do whatever I want.”. I then proceeded to magically fix the hole in my balloon, and floated off to safety.

When I awoke later on, I was amazed.

Something must have snapped in my ID that day, since the same thing happens any time I am having a bad dream even today. If I start to have a dream that a murderer is chasing me, for instance, there is always a point where I suddenly snap to, and pick up a bat in my dream and beat the living shit out of the guy. Then I wake up happy. As I said, not ONE nightmare in 20 years now. It’s kinda freaky…..

Not that this has anything really to do with what I was about to talk about, except that the one side effect this ability seems to have had on my subconscious is that sometimes I have pretty fucked up dreams…..

Case in point:

Last night I had a dream that I was living in an apartment with my grandfather (I don’t, although I did grow up living in the same house with him).

In the dream, I came home early from work, only to find a dark-skinned man putting on his underwear in my living room.

When I confronted the man, I realized that it was Adam Durits, the lead singer of the Counting Crows.

He sat me down and started explaining to me that my grandfather was getting dressed in the bedroom, and that he would be out in a minute.

He further went on to explain to me that he and my grandfather were lovers, and had been together for 6 years now, when they met at a party. He was upset because neither he nor my grandfather wanted me to find out about their Brokebacking ways in this way….

This morning, I woke up laughing my ass off at such an odd dreaming, but as I said, for me, it’s become par for the course to have dreams such as this….

Anyone out there a dreams analyst? Someone has GOT to explain this one to me.

I just can’t look at my grandfather in the face again until I get some closure.